Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1847

Marginal pencil notation in A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 243. The second part of the notation may have been written on a later occasion than the first.

Original is missing.

/Eddington: “Firstly, a strictly quantitative science can arise from a basis which is purely qualitative. The comparability that has to be assumed axiomatically is a merely qualitative discrimination of likeness and unlikeness.” (Emphasis by Spencer Heath)/

But the converse is not impossible.

The converse is possible and is true. In all rational technology, qualitative ends are achieved by quantitative means.